Introduction

The Rockland County Beekeepers Association was founded by a small group of beekeepers who believe that as stewards of the honeybee, our responsibility goes beyond the everyday activities of maintaining our hives and harvesting honey. We believe that the future health and well-being of honeybees depends on a natural approach to their care. Our goal is to share resources and experience and to support each other in holistic beekeeping. We welcome local beekeepers to join us.

We hope to become better at adapting our bees to the local conditions, and to help each other to do so.

“In my earlier beekeeping years I was often sorely puzzled at the diametrically opposite views often expressed by the different correspondents for the bee journals. In extension of that state of mind I may say that at that time I did not dream of the wonderful differences of locality in its relation to the management of bees. I saw, measured weighted, compared, and considered all things apicutlural by the standard of my own home–Genesee County, Michigan. It was not until I had seen the fields of New York white with buckwheat, admired the luxuriance of sweet-clover growth in the suburbs of Chicago, followed for miles the great irrigating ditches of Colorado, where they give lift to the royal purple of the alfalfa bloom, and climbed mountains in California, pulling myself up by grasping the sagebrush, that I fully realized the great amount of apicultural meaning stored up in that one little word—locality.”—W.Z. Hutchinson, Advanced Bee Culture